| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Diamond's Hope Diamond's
Hope California Wild: Since yesterday was Valentine's Day, let's start with a romance question. Bonobos may have the most active sex life, but you've written in Why is Sex Fun? that human sexuality is the most bizarre. Why is our strange sexuality a key part of the evolutionary package that distinguishes us from other animals? Jared Diamond: By our own standards we are completely normal, and all those animals out there are weird. By the standards of all those animals, we are the ones who are weird. For example, we take involvement of fathers in the care of their children as completely normal, but in fact, for something like 90 percent of mammals, the fathers have no involvement with their offspring. The fathers just mate, and the mothers do all the work rearing offspring. It takes something special to get fathers involved. With chimpanzees, the father doesn't know who his child is. The chimpanzee father just gives some protection to all the babies in the troop but there's no one-to-one relationship. A gorilla father assumes, because he's the only [sexually active] male in the troop, that he's the father. But, again, the one-to-one relationship for offspring is with the mother. One can make all sorts of jokes about men being wimps and women doing most of the work, and it's substantially true. Yes, human fathers are lousy by human standards, but by chimpanzee standards they're terrific. A reasonable guess as to why human fathers stay involved is that sex has something to do with it. We have this one-to-one pair bond between mother and father. You also get that in solitary territorial mammals like gibbons, where the male and female stay together and there's largely no other choice. But where there is a choice, as in a troop of chimpanzees or baboons, basically every female mates with most of the males. It's really weird that we humans, when we're surrounded by all these sexually attractive creatures, confine most of our sexual activity to a single individual. And, of course, that's essential for rearing babies. Because if fathers and mothers were playing around indiscriminately, it would be crazy for a man to devote himself to a baby, because the odds would be that the baby didn't carry his genes. So that's how sex fits into the whole package of pair bonding, lifelong relationships, and monogamy. CW: You've written poignantly about Carl Sagan and the backlash he encountered among fellow scientists by being a public persona and a science communicator. If you're correct that science journalists can't replace scientists as role models to inspire our youth, what do you think should be done to encourage younger scientists to feel that they can deal with the public as communicators, without jeopardizing their careers? JD: The way it stands now, younger scientists would be crazy to be communicators, because they would be committing suicide with their careers. What should be done—but there is no sign that it is about to be done—is for scientists to wake up and change their attitude. Scientists speak out of the left side of their mouths that the government should give them more money and should appreciate science. But then scientists, out of the other side of their mouths, won't go to the effort of trying to communicate science to the public. If you won't do it yourself, then at least permit other scientists to do it. But scientists make it difficult for other scientists to communicate to the public. There are career penalties. CW: How much of that do you think is simply envy on the part of the scientists who aren't able to communicate? There are so few celebrity scientists. JD: The one time that I met Carl Sagan in person was at a National Academy of Sciences meeting where he gave a talk about communication and the public. He was talking about the issue of jealousy, and he said, "Of course, if some scientist has devoted his whole life to the hyperfine structure of molybdenum, no reporter pays attention to him. And here I come along and reporters rush after me to ask my latest comments on the possibility of life on Mars. That's really a blow to the ego of the person who devoted his life to the hyperfine structure of molybdenum." CW: Reporters may have even run after Sagan to ask him about molybdenum, right? That would really gall the specialist. JD: He could explain molybdenum, whereas the expert would launch right in without saying what molybdenum is. So, yes, jealousy is a part of it. CW: I wonder how that part can be addressed. Maybe there just is no way, or, if scientists were somehow coaxed out of their holes a bit, the celebrity could be spread around. Normalize things a little. JD: I agree. If there are only two or three scientists who are well known to the public, then there are some real conspicuous targets to envy. But if there are hundreds or thousands, then envy is defused. CW: You've written about how it's a tragedy that most scientific writing is incomprehensible even to scientists. So not only are they not writing for the public, but they're writing at such a level of specialization that their colleagues in other fields cannot begin to fathom the latest developments. Do you have any advice as to how to get around that problem? JD: There are simple ways to get around it. The two leading general scientific journals internationally are Science in the United States and Nature in Britain. Nature does it well and Science does it badly. Nature requires that each article begin with an abstract, which is written in clear, general terms. Nature requires that all technical methods be buried in small print at the end of the article. Between the abstract and the methods there's a text that's more technical than the abstract but does not handle all the gory details. Whereas in Science, there's an abstract which is incomprehensible, a first paragraph which is incomprehensible, and there are the methods sprinkled throughout. So the whole thing is incomprehensible. And in addition, Nature has an opening section called "News and Views." The section is written by scientists who have perspective, and they're good articles. In Science most of the research news section is not written by scientists but by reporters who simply don't have the perspective. So there is no mystery about how to do it better. All that Science would have to do is to copy Nature. CW: You delve into a very broad range of subjects. Have you experienced any backlash from colleagues saying you've strayed too far outside your own area of expertise? JD: For the most part, no. I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that I started to do this relatively late in my career, when I was in my fifties, so I was already quite well established on the technical science. And I've kept up the technical science. Nobody can say, "He's doing this because he's no good at the other stuff." Another thing is that everything I write that's outside my immediate area I give to some expert in the field to read. So I get my facts correct. Therefore, it's rare that anybody questions me on my facts. Occasionally, people question me because they don't like my perspective, but on the facts, I haven't gotten much flak. CW: You describe New Guinea as "one of the world's biological treasures" and the home of your intellectual roots and much of your emotional life. Why has it become such a special place in your life since you first went there in 1964? JD: New Guinea's got the most wonderful birds in the world: birds of paradise, bowerbirds, mound builders, and the world's most diverse parrots, and kingfishers, and pigeons. So the birds are great. It's one of three places in the world where you get glaciers on the equator, because it's so high, 16,500 feet. It's the only place where you can see glaciers from coral reefs, because New Guinea is so steep. It's a miniature universe with everything from savannas to glaciers and alpine grassland. And then you've got the people. There are a thousand different tribes with a thousand languages. And until recently all of them were using stone tools and were without centralized political organization. And these people spend lots of time hunting in the forest, so they know their birds and plants very well. It's fascinating for birds and it's fascinating for people. CW: What sort of changes have you seen? And how do you see it changing in the near future? JD: Well, eastern New Guinea has become independent. In 1964 it was still an Australian colony. Now it's an independent democracy called Papua New Guinea. And Papua New Guinea has been undergoing, as one would expect, the usual trends in the Third World where the people want to get into the world culture. They want westernized food, and they want clothes, and they want umbrellas, and they want beer, and they want Coca-Cola, and they want airplanes. Some of them have skills that let them work, and lots of them don't have the necessary skills, so they turn to crime. The result is that in Papua New Guinea the cities have become quite dangerous. CW: You recently referred to some positive environmental signs in Chevron's oil-drilling activity on New Guinea. Could you elaborate on that? JD: New Guinea has one large producing oil field, in Papua New Guinea, and it's managed by Chevron. Because I've been on the Board of Directors of the World Wildlife Fund, which has a partnership agreement with Chevron to look at environmental problems, I went out to the oil fields last year. They're in the mountains, 150 miles inland, and the oil is run by a pipeline to the coast. And because the coast is so flat, the pipeline then goes 50 miles offshore until the water is deep enough to load the oil onto tankers from an offshore platform. I had been in one oil field before. That was in Indonesia, run by an un-named oil company. It was just as dreadful as everything you read in the newspapers, so I did not expect much from the Chevron fields. But when I looked for the oil wells and derricks, I didn't see any. I didn't see any because there aren't any. I was looking for big gashes, and there weren't any. Instead, you could just see a thin line through the rainforest that was the pipeline road, and the forest canopy in places had closed over the road. And then as we landed, out across the airstrip walked a cassowary, which is New Guinea's big flightless bird like an ostrich. It's normally extremely shy because hunters shoot it. I've seen wild cassowary twice in 35 years, and that was the second one. And at the edge of the oil fields were flying New Guinea's rarest birds. At least the environment is in fantastic shape there. There aren't any access roads. Everything is put in by helicopter and they don't put up a derrick, because for every tree that's cut down the New Guinea natives will sue them. Not only for the tree but for all the birds of paradise that used to hang out in that tree. The result is that the oil fields are like a gigantic national park. In fact, they are by far the best national park in New Guinea. CW: That's remarkable. What lessons could you take from that example and apply to other places such as Africa and Latin America where oil and mining projects are not run so punctiliously? JD: Well, one lesson is that in the long run it's in the best interests of the extractive industries to do a clean job. In New Guinea, it's in Chevron's interest not only in the long run but also in the short run. If Chevron cuts down an extra tree today, the natives will be suing them or hijacking their helicopters tomorrow. But elsewhere it's in the interest of the industry in the long run. I don't know the total that Chevron is spending on the World Wildlife project but it's on the order of roughly a million dollars a year. So for a million dollars a year Chevron is saving itself the risk of losing four billion dollars [such as Exxon spent in the wake of the Valdez spill], and it's a no-brainer. CW: Could you tell us how your early work on birds in New Guinea contributed to the development of your ideas about extinction on islands and in parks? JD: One can think of studies in the wild of natural areas as being models for national parks. National parks increasingly are islands of protected habitat in the middle of a sea of unprotected habitat. In the long run, instead of having a matrix of natural habitat with cities scattered in the matrix there will be a matrix of concrete with national parks scattered in the matrix. When you've got isolated populations, there are going to be problems. If the isolated population consists of one male and no females, then there is going to be a problem next year. If the isolated population consists of five males and three females, the problem will develop a little later. If the isolated population consists of a few hundred individuals, like the grizzly bears in Yellowstone, the grizzly bear is not going to go extinct next year because there are 200 of them. But 200 grizzly bears means, on the average, 100 males and 100 females, and half the females are immature so you've got 50 females. And out of those 50 mature females probably ten are really successful breeders. So with ten out of 200 it's clear that there are inbreeding problems. How you get models of what's going to happen in national parks is to see what's happened in places like New Guinea where habitats come in patches, and you can see the relationship between the size of the patch and the number of species in the patch. So, in short, a lot of the stuff I've been doing in New Guinea is looking at natural habitats which are natural models for protected areas. CW: What advice have you given the governments of Indonesia and New Guinea regarding the establishment of preserves? JD: One simple example is that there are some species in New Guinea that live at low population density. The New Guinea harpy eagle is a big bird, and one pair of harpy eagles has a territory probably between ten and 100 square miles. Suppose someone says, "Let's set up a national park" and it's a hundred square miles. And then you do your calculation: a hundred square miles includes maybe one pair of harpy eagles or, at best, ten pairs. That's not going to be enough in the long run. So one message is: in order to protect rare species which have a large effect on ecosystems, just as grizzly bears do, you need big parks. Another message is that you should have parks in different habitats. You can have a park at the top of the mountains. You can have a park in the lowlands to protect the lowland species, which is separate from a park for the montane species. But you'd do better to have these montane and lowland parks connected to each other, because some of those montane birds, when they're not breeding, descend to the lowlands. If there's nothing there in the lowlands, then they're out of business for part of their life cycle. So another message has been to make the national parks at different altitudes and different habitats abutting each other. CW: The debate about a single large or several small reserves has been a big part of island biogeography. You've argued that the ideal nature reserve should be big, round, and connected to or close to adjoining protected areas. Is this still a viable debate, or do you think there's a consensus now in support of single large reserves? JD: Well, it's complicated because there are also some arguments for small reserves. Suppose the government says, "Here's 10,000 square miles. That's going to be all your national parks." Should you put it all into one 10,000-square-mile national park? If you do, inevitably there are going to be some species that aren't there. You might say that in California our biggest national parks should be Yosemite or Sequoia-Kings Canyon and we'll forget about everything else outside. Let's make Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon as big as possible. That will cover lots of species, but it won't cover the least terns nesting on the coast. It's not going to cover the California condors in the Sespe Wilderness. It's not going to cover the California gnatcatcher. So one needs a diversity of small parks just to cover different pieces of habitat and different areas of endemism. The case where you want large parks is in rich habitats with keystone species such as grizzly bears, and timber wolves, and bison. CW: Your next book will focus on the fragility of societies that ultimately failed because their relationship to their environment wasn't sustainable. Now that you've been in California for 30 years, what are your thoughts about the sustainability of society here and our relationship to our environment? JD: Well, it's perfectly obvious that society in the United States as it's going on now is not sustainable. We're not living within our own resources; we're drawing on resources from the rest of the world. The question is: At the rate we're going now, how long is it sustainable? You can argue whether it's sustainable for 15 years or 50, but it's certainly not going to be sustainable beyond 50 years and probably less. What's going to put an end to it? Is it going to be ended by measures of our choice, or is it going to be ended by measures not of our choice? The latter will certainly be unpleasant. CW: In what ways might we choose to end our current trajectory? JD: Two simple things. Our impact on the environment is a product of A times B. A is the number of people, B is impact per person. So we have to work on these two things. The only thing that's missing is the political decision. Everybody knows that there are already too many people. I've never met anyone anywhere in the world who said, "There are too few people in my backyard. We've got to have more people here." Everybody, whether in New Guinea or California, claims there are too many people. There are lots of measures for halting population growth, and in many cases they work, like in Italy and increasingly in Indonesia and Singapore. And places where they don't work are places where you have very stupid government policies like in the United States, where leading politicians and leading non-politicians deny that we have a population problem and oppose obvious, cheap measures to halt population growth. The other thing is to reduce what we take out of the environment and what we put into it. CW: The "A" and the "B" that you describe create a very simple equation that anybody ought to be able to recognize, and yet the numbers that people seem to be paying attention to are the growth of the stock market. What kind of wake-up call do we need? JD: I don't think we're so far away. Already there are lots of people concerned about the environment, and they vote, and they buy things. What we need is somewhat more people concerned about the environment, and somewhat fewer people who are blind about environmental matters. Home Depot is a good example. Home Depot is the largest timber products retailer and buyer in the United States, in fact in the whole world. Last August, Home Depot announced that by 2002 it will eliminate purchases of timber from environmentally sensitive areas and will convert to purchases of timber from forests that are certified as being indefinitely sustainable. In England, already one quarter of all timber products are coming from certified sources and the largest timber supplier has converted to certified timber. So there are hopeful things already happening. It doesn't take any magic. CW: Right, but you have also said that within 50 years we'll be consuming more energy than we receive from the Sun. That's going to require more than certification to correct. Certification sounds like a step in the right direction, but it's a "baby step" given the scope of the problem. JD: Among these certification movements, the one that's furthest along, that's already in the stores, is timber. And the one that's next furthest along, that will be in the stores by this Christmas, is fisheries. And the two that are next furthest along are certification of the extractive industries—namely, coal, oil, and gas. That's on the drawing board. Then there is the certification of the output industries that pollute the atmosphere. So I expect that within five years there will be certification of industries that would otherwise be apt to exceed the limits of photosynthesis. CW: We're at an advantage over those civilizations that have gone extinct because we have books and we can read about them. How can we exploit this advantage? JD: You are the advantage. You are the reason for hope. The Easter Islanders didn't have magazines and people writing for the public about these issues. When Easter Islanders cut down the last tree, there was no way they could know that this had already happened in Mycenaean Greece and it was happening at the same time among the Anasazi in the Southwest. So, when I think of reasons not to jump out of that window, there are two. One is that we can learn from the past through archeology and by reading. And the other is that just by turning on the television we can learn what's happening right now in distant places like Somalia and Afghanistan and possibly the former Soviet Union, where there are already ecological disasters. When you ask what really is different now, there are things that are worse and there are things that are better. One thing that's worse is that there are lots more people. Six billion in the world instead of ten thousand on Easter Island. And we have much more potent destructive technology. That's the bad part. The good part is that we have the media, and we can learn from the past and we can learn from remote places. CW: Any predictions? JD: I hope you guys win. The way I would sum it up is that I'm not an unbridled optimist. Anybody who says, "There's no problem, we can carry along, and don't worry about all these environmentalists," that's a blind point of view. The opposite extreme would be to say, "It's hopeless." I have dear friends who said, "We're not going to have children because what's looming just looks so bad and we don't want to launch children into that world." There are plenty of people who think there's no way that a few poor environmentalists can cope with the juggernaut of the well-financed evil businesses. And I'm not at that extreme, either. There are serious problems and we've got to work on them, but if we work on them there's a chance of success. CW: Besides contemplating these major issues, you also study cell biology. Do these two activities connect either in your daily life or in your thinking? Do the two Jared Diamonds talk to each other? JD: They do talk to each other. I'm in San Francisco for two lectures. One last night for the Academy about the environment, and today I'm speaking at the University of California, San Francisco, on the evolution of human infectious diseases and genetic diseases. So this afternoon is cell and molecular biology, but the framework is an evolutionary framework. With any disease you have questions about how it evolved. And with any gene defects like cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs you've got an evolutionary question. That's where the two parties can talk to each other. CW: A lot of scientists that I talk to try to separate their ethical selves from their scientific selves. Your science seems to be motivated by ethical concerns. JD: I don't think of it explicitly in that way. I would translate it is as follows. My wife and I had our kids, twins, twelve years ago, when I was already well credentialed scientifically. When the kids were born, my wife and I went through the usual stuff, figuring out how much television should they watch, where to send them to school, and what about life insurance. But having been born in 1937 and grown up during the Second World War, I realized that what's going to help my kids is not our life insurance policies but what the world is like. So that's part of what motivates me to work on these environmental questions, but it's not only that. It's that these environmental questions are just so fascinating. Why did the Anasazi collapse? Why did the Mississippi Moundbuilder society collapse? They were the two most advanced societies in North America. Or, here we are in California, the richest farmlands of the United States. Why did Native Californians not develop agriculture? These questions are just so interesting. CW: But are they interesting because they matter to modern society, or are they just interesting, and they matter? JD: Both. They're interesting and they matter. Now would I work on something that's interesting and doesn't matter? I think that's an academic question because nowadays I don't find things interesting that don't matter. In fact, my physiology work, which used to be the usual reductionist cell biology, is now done from an evolutionary perspective because I just can't relate to something that you can only see in an electron microscope.
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Summer 2000
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